Hewlett-Packard has partnered with Novell in developing a new, secure Linux desktop product. At the same time, HP has joined up with Mozilla to promote a desktop virtualization project for small business customers.

The many years of hard work and reverse engineering that went into developing the free Nouveau drivers for NVIDIA graphics cards have finally paid off. Nouveau is now included in the repository of the next Ubuntu 9.04 release.

Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst sees opportunities for open source firms that might be putting undue burden on their dwindling IT departments because of the current economic downturn. Whitehurst offered his views in a press conference in Munich. His conclusion: "When people look at alternatives, often Open Source wins."

MySQL founder Michael "Monty" Widenius warns in his blog against putting the current version 5.1 of the popular database package into production. He's critical of the release policy and fears that the product's quality may suffer.

A workgroup of the Linux Foundation has been tasked to implement the IPv6 next-generation Internet protocol for Linux and can now report that its work meets U.S Department of Defense (DoD) mandate and certification requirements.

In May 2008 at Linuxtag in Berlin, Nat Friedman had presented SUSE Studio, with which you can build your own Linux distro with just a few mouse clicks. SUSE Studio images are now available for the Eee 701 PC.